This monthly email update makes me realize how quickly time passes, and also how arbitrary it is.
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I spent most of this month in SF, with a week in Toronto. I love California. I love its liveliness, its vividness, its naiveté, its people. I hosted my first Mandarin dinner for heritage speakers, which was lovely, and went to far too many venture-funded restaurant meals (I’m now trying to get on semaglutide, which should reduce cravings such that I will be eternally fasted except when I’m fed for free). The next one is June 10th, come through!
I love LocalFoodz, a food plan that’s actually yummy while also hitting your macro + calorie goals — referral link here. I also started using an EA service (Athena, referral link for second month free, it’s $3k/mo); it’s been tremendously helpful to have a full-time EA, especially for alleviating my RSI. I started using Superhuman and Linear (using keyboard shortcuts for everything is amazing). And I found an amazing therapist in person in SF! So, I’ve worked through a lot of my life infra upgrade queue, although I’m still looking for an executive coach, especially those skilled with working with neurodiverse women of color.
I’m moving in with two of my teammates into a beautiful apartment in NoPA, but we are still looking for a 12-month least starting August 1. If you’re interested in working at or consulting with Trellis, let me know and you can cowork at our office one day.
I made a few new friends in Toronto in publishing, and as a result purchased way too many indie books at book fairs that I’m excited to read. Some poetry, some magical realism, some auto-fiction. One of my literary friends told me I have a real talent for poetry, and is willing to be responsible for my poetry education, which is tremendously exciting for me. I finished up a writing workshop I’ve been enrolled in for the past six weeks on poetry about technology, so I’ve been looking for both community & guidance in improving my craft and building up my poetry portfolio to submit to various journals.
I’m working out quite a lot, lifting 5x a week, and yoga 5x a week. I want to start swimming again once a week, and need a coach to reteach me forms and flips. It’s been motivating to work alongside people who work really hard both on their companies and on their bodies.
I’m still looking for a SF apartment to purchase.
I’m working on an essay artifact for Verses on tools for conviviality, which I feel excited about. Other members are thinking about shrines, worship, and neurodivergence. I’m super excited for the retreat (we are all going to go to Bota Bota, probably my favourite commercial space in the world, it’s a spa on a boat). Your invite and proposed itinerary here - ~30+ people are coming!
I’m turning 25 in about a month, and searching for wise memoirs, biographies, and poetry to guide me into the second quarter of my life wisely, thoughtfully, and joyfully. My focus in the first quarter of my life, looking back, was exploration, early inklings of mastery, and getting the wilder things under control. The second quarter will be on building long-standing commitments (to Trellis, to verses, to my loves, to my community and family), working on my physical & mental health, and building a home & family of my own. I think my third quarter will be intellectual and artistic exploration, freed of the obligation to build longitudinally and again available for compact, ephemeral gestures.
Feeling full of light. I wish you well!
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It’s springtime. Gaia breathes freely again, no longer choked by snow. I’m in Toronto right now, and the streets are covered with what look like AI-generated trees. They’re all slightly too vivid, too intricate.
I’m going to try posting more logistical life updates more regularly, inspired by Andy Jones and Ben Mann. I’ve derived so much pleasure reading about the minutiae of their lives. This mode of writing also captures one of my favorite aspects of friendship: getting to accompany someone, and listen to their observations of their own way of moving through and encountering the world.
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Life updates
I started a new company, Trellis, with Danish Shabbir, which I plan to work on for a very, very long time. I’d love to hire someone to lead growth with me very soon. I’m feeling deeply excited; there is a lot of work ahead, but I believe with my entire soul that this will be a generational, world-changing company. You should join us!
I’m organizing a Montreal retreat June 29 - July 8 for Trellis folks, Verses contributors, and 100+ of my friends (at least there are that many of us in the OG signal chat — don’t worry, I’ve hired two friends to run operations). If you’d like to come, join this Discord. Those dates overlap with the second largest international jazz festival in the world, a street circus festival, and my birthday! It’ll be life-changing, I promise. We’ll be organizing lots of gatherings, hackathons, and get-togethers. Plus, Montreal during the summer is the best city on the planet. Come and fall in love.
Experiments and experiences
I’ve been travelling a lot! Toronto, Edmonton, Washington DC, and a few weeks in New York. I am going to sign my first lease and stop travelling cold turkey.
I’ve been going on a lot of first dates. I went on the best first date of my life a few weeks ago in NYC, where we meandered through art galleries and bookstores and boba shops, and made a dozen friends out of strangers we encountered on the street. We ended the night at Book Club, a lovely bookstore that also doubles as a bar and event venue. There was a trivia night happening, and we happened to join the winning team, which included a retired literature professor, a pair of couples I expect I’ll be friends with for a long time to come.
I gave my first proper conference talk at Causal Islands 2023. I’m super proud to have been featured alongside the rest of the speakers - it was a super interesting group of folks. It’s just 15 min, and you can watch the recording here. I highly recommend Chia Amisola’s talk which is immediately after about the Creation Myths of Computing. It is the most poetic talk I’ve ever attended.
Writing work
I’m looking to place an almost-finished piece on digital phenomenology / worlds / home-building / cosmotechnics at some magazine. Logic Magazine initially accepted it but then said it was insufficiently focused on technology, but I can’t modify it. It’s very philosophical. Let me know if you have recommendations.
I’m writing a piece on the digital epistemic commons for Trellis’ magazine, BLOOM.
Consumption
Read/reading:
Look at the Lights, My Love by the Nobel Prize-winning author Annie Erneaux. It’s a series of observations about supermarkets, which I adore. I love nonfiction that feels like observing the world together with really smart people.
Tough Enough. This covers the lives of some women who have comprised some of the most fundamental parts of my intellectual bedrock: Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Simone Weil, and Joan Didion.
Two Cheers for Anarchism by James C. Scott - I had heard about this book but didn’t realize it was by Scott. I’m reading lots of Kimmerer, Scott, Graeber, Le Guin — please send me recs for anarchism (I’m interested in both political anarchism and relationship anarchism).
I watched Hamilton for the first time, which was a wonderful experience!
I put together a playlist of my favourite songs here, and would love to listen to yours (preferably annotated as to what you love about individual songs and particular portions you love!) if you’d like to share.
Creation:
I did a series of portraits while in NYC, just holed up in a cafe and asked friends to come by who I wanted to draw. I’m proudest of my portrait of Priya, which took me ~70 minutes!
What my life is missing:
I’m looking for a lease - either 1 or 2 bedroom - in SF for 9-12 months in Hayes or NoPa.
I’m actively looking for a life partner. If you’d like to see my draft dating doc, let me know! Or just introduce me to lovely people, ideally in SF.Looking for a healthy food subscriptions in SF, as well as a personal trainer focused on bodybuilding/bikini competitions, and nutritionist. I am looking to lose 25-30 pounds of fat by the end of this year, which I gained over the last year as a result of depressive eating.
Looking for classes in massage, silversmithing, and writing based out of SF.
A keyboard + speakers - if you have a high quality keyboard, like a Kawai ES920, I’d love to buy it off of you.
I want to buy 2-bedroom apartments, one in Mile End in Montreal, one in West Village in NYC. NYC is the only city in North America that can match my tempo. I feel a deep sense of comfort that there is always someone awake at the same time I am. Please send me leads!
I’m interested in speaking at more conferences; it seems like a great way to recruit people and make new friends. Please send me CFPs to interesting conferences, and ask me to speak. Prioritizing paid opportunities, and happy to travel. I can speak about Trellis (more broadly, education x AI), Verses (more broadly, creative participatory software / pluriversality / interdependence), iiicorporate governance, and various flavors of philosophy.
I’ve been trying to speak more French, and plan to pick up Mandarin again quite soon. I’m functional in both languages but not fluent. Hit me up to form French and Mandarin-speaking social groups in San Francisco while I’m there the next year please! (I’m searching for a lease but afraid of becoming a monolingual tech bro). I’m really excited by this new language learning software based off of the demo.
May your next month be meaningful,
Jasmine
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I think of many of the people closest to me as poets, although most of them have never authored anything resembling what’s traditionally deemed a poem. They read as poets to me because they speak with the economy of poetry, concerned primarily with rhythm, timbre, and weight, and practice the special quality of attention that that economy requires.
They attend to their instrument, playing out language’s particularities and peculiarities. Finding the right words requires both intellectual gymnastics and a careful attunement to the songful dimensions of speech. Ocean Vuong wrote that a metaphor should have both a logical and sensory connection between the origin image and the transforming image. At their best, metaphors can reorient the mind completely, even induce original sight.
They also attend to the object of their instrument. There’s the famous Daoist story of the butcher who never had to sharpen his axe, since he had studied the object of his instrument so closely that the blade slid cleanly through flesh, never encountering bone. One of my closest friends says his love language is deep attention. When I’m confused about a situation, he listens to what I have to say, directs me with careful questions, and then goes away for a few hours. Eventually, he comes back with a question or framing that slices through my fog. I treasure his speech deeply. The attention that undergirds it stands in sharp contrast to the hastily shared words and online takes generated against a backdrop of common knowledge that attention is both scarce and low quality.
Simone Weil, the great French mystic who fasted to death in solidarity with frontline soldiers, said that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”. A few years ago I attended a workshop in Northern California. One evening, we were asked to try social experiments to expand our comfort zones. I decided to sit apart from the party and be visibly alone. After a few minutes, I began, without any verbal communication, to hold the gaze of someone I had met just a few days prior. I knew I was part of his eye-gazing experiment. The world fell away as I watched his eyes watch me. There was an internal shift when I realized I did not have to perform or act in order to be attended to. Marina Abramovic, the grand matriarch of durational performance art, created this feeling for hundreds of people with her work, The Artist is Present, and many were moved to tears. Watch this video and come back.
If you’ve been lucky enough to have had a deep relationship with another human being, you know what pure attention and witness feel like. The poet David Whyte said that "the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self. The ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone, and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them, and to have believed in them, and sometimes, just to have accompanied them, for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone". I can play all the iterated vulnerability games I want with someone, but I only truly feel well with them if we’ve reached the plateau state where both parties feel intrinsically worthy of the other’s attention. Weil said that “absolutely unmixed attention is prayer”. To attend to something properly isto resacralize it.
I’m partly fascinated by attention because my own is awful. I flit between thought to thought, a moth thirsty for light. Like many others, my attention has been challenged by the pandemic. Most of the discourse on attention is framed in terms of productivity. Someone told me anxiously over dinner last week that she isn’t able to focus on her work like she used to be able to. I reassure her, and think to myself that attention is important for all sorts of other reasons. When I walked through the subway to meet her at this restaurant, I felt the skin of my scalp tightening under the hum of the bright fluorescent lights, and my shoulder muscles squeeze in response to an especially dirty stairwell. Now that I am sitting here in a warmly lit space with a new friend, my body is looser, and more porous in some ways. I take on the lilt of her speech. Trying to articulate a novel thought, I feel my way towards the right handle with the entirety of my body, imagine how words would taste in my mouth, how they fit the shape of this new uncharted luminosity. Sometimes, the precise phrase comes easily. Other times, I bumble, throw words around, see what sticks. In these awkward moments when the right words do not arise, if I’m comfortable with who I’m with, I simply hold my tongue.
Weil was part of a particular lineage of ethical psychology that conceptualized the ethical agent as a witness; the primary responsibility is not to change the world but to understand, in contrast with the Humean lineage that describes the ethical agent as an actor, whose primary responsibility is to change the world. It was nontrivial, however, to achieve the sort of clear perception she spoke of; among other things, it required an integrated character.
Witnessing and attending sound passive, but it is far from easy to achieve clear perception, to truly and deeply see.
This practice feels urgent. Weil believed that simple attention was required for moral attention, which was required for empathy, which was required for ethical action. We are unable to act ethically towards that which we have not first attended to; this includes other humans, but also the non-human other. The art of attention requires, among other things, an openness to being moved and transformed, the development of language, and the resistance of algorithmic life.
One way to practice attention is to notice the non-logical aspects of communication. Attunement to the melodic quality of our language draws those we are in dialogue with to be more in tune with their own senses, and opens our own ears to the sonority of other creatures. Read a poem today, perhaps this one that describes the limits of the language, and feel it in your mouth. Speak out different beliefs (“I’m sitting on a bed in Brooklyn”, “I’m a woman”, “I’m rich”, “I’m poor”), and see how your body feels after each one. An ambitious Bay Area research group aimed at reinventing psychology called that practice belief reporting. It reminds me in some ways of a theatre exercise I used to do called “voicefinding”. The goal was to find your natural voice. If you’d like to try it, place your fingers right above where your jaw curves into your neck. Start humming with the highest part of your range, and move downwards, while moving your voice placement through your facial mask, throat, then chest. There should be a placement where your voice shifts and changes from something like a string harmonic to a fuller timbre. The first time I did this was remarkable. I suddenly noticed overtones in my voice that I didn’t realize were missing. Others noticed the difference too; I was only fourteen, but people thought I was already in university.
There’s an apocryphal story of a man who cried moving through a major New York art gallery from piece to piece. Patrons, who preferred to nod sagely at various works and shake their heads slightly at others, became increasingly disturbed as his reactions became gradually more intense. Eventually, the gallery management asked him to leave. I wonder at the depth of his feeling, and his lack of fear of expressing it in public. Two years ago, my mind was gently then suddenly rubbed raw by various philosophical conundrums, and I spent a few days extremely open to all stimuli: I cried listening to jazz, upon understanding a particularly difficult math equation, walking up a grand set of stairs. I was in an elevated state of receptiveness that people have induced for millennia, and that performance artists like Abramovic have practiced to achieve incredible feats of endurance that transcended the needs of the body.
I wonder what Weil’s final week might have been like, if her attention was turned to external forms, internally on her failing organs, or to another plane entirely. Her death reminds me of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, a beautiful and violent meditation on the body, where a woman wishes for nothing but to become a tree, to feed herself by sunbeams alone. I suspect that if Weil’s attention was in fact directed inwards, that she would not have experienced a dark destruction of form but a sanctifying, warm light.
Wittgenstein said that “you cannot enter worlds for which you do not have the language.” Jenny Odell, in How to Do Nothing, discusses how learning the language of birders helped her distinguish better between different birds. One of the most pleasurable parts of learning a new domain for me is developing the language that accompanies the development of taste. This is this sort of chocolate, and I like that more because xyz, this sort of music. There is a delight in finally discovering the exact right label for one’s felt experience. Language facilitates higher levels of attention.
Conversely, we are not typically kind to the worlds we do not have language for, or objects that remain illegible to us. Over the last century or so we’ve improved somewhat in our treatment of various peoples. We practice standpoint theory selectively with some groups we are able to communicate with: women, queer folks, people of colour. But we are still unkind to the mentally ill. In Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, she recounts how she uses legible status labels - bestselling author, Yale honors graduate - to rehumanize herself to both clinical and professional audiences. The mentally ill are terrifying partially because they are illegible and unpredictable. Our conditioned impulse towards them, as it is towards all unknown terrain, is to master, conquer, and make useful. We are so anxious to normalize people to our own baseline. For mood disorders, a patient's mental ‘fitness’ is measured primarily by the degree to which she is able to hold down a 9-5 job. Grandiosity and being ‘overly’ ambitious are markers of narcissistic personality disorder. There are alternative treatment institutions for people experiencing extreme states that follow in the footsteps of psychiatrist R. D. Laing by orienting to these states as teachers. What would happen if we allowed and supported people to traverse the wild skies of joy and the keenest edges of grief and sorrow? What peaks and valleys of human experience would these voyagers be able to chart?
E. F. Schumacher believed that those genuinely interested in inner development would study the lives and works of people for whom “the striving for ‘power’ has entirely ceased and been replaced by a certain transcendental longing”, and who had “broken out of our ordinary confinement of time and space”. Maslow proposed a similar type of psychological research: instead of attempting to understand the inner states of first-year Harvard students, we should study those living at what Maslow called the furthest reaches of human nature.
One of my friends, who experiences cyclothymia, gave me a beautiful metaphor once about friendship. She thinks of her friends as a tether, not a weight. If she’s feeling hypomanic, she hopes that her friend’s first instinct is not to warn her not to fly too close to the sun. Let her be generative, expansive, magical. Don’t aim to pop the balloon, but hold its attached string carefully. Trust that she will come back to earth eventually, or even better, find ground on an entirely different planet.
Philosophers like Yuk Hui trace this tendency to reduce the illegible other to a ‘resource’ to something deeply ingrained in Western cosmology itself, where man conceptualizes himself as apart from and independent of the world. The world is an ‘other’, a blank slate upon which his will is executed. Heidegger’s definition of technology was that it ‘revealed’ the world as a resource. This definition of technology, where humanity employs technology to ‘make use of’ the world, is predicated on an oppositional relationship between man and world. Hui is interested in how an Eastern cosmology might change, or completely redefine, the ontology of the self-other relation, so that the self and the other are interdependent.
Even if we choose to retain a clean self-other distinction, Buber offers a challenge to the instrumentalizing worldview. He calls the way we typically relate to the other an I-It relation. We try to collapse the other into an easily legible measure, or set of measures - how tall is the tree? How does it look? What species is it? - and by doing so “the tree remains ‘your’ object and has its place and its time span, its kind and condition”. Instead, he calls for us to allow ourselves to be drawn into a reciprocal relationship with the tree, where we see the tree in its entirety. “Whatever belongs to the tree is included: its form and its mechanics, its colors and its chemistry, its conversation with the elements and its conversation with the stars”, all of the tree, confronting us bodily.
The sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls a similar mode of relating resonance. Instead of viewing ourselves as closed off, independent systems bent on controlling the other, we should leave ourselves open to being affected by the world, responsive to its call, and thereby allow ourselves to transform and be transformed by it.This orientation reminds me of how one must approach a poem if one hopes to be moved by it; you can analyze it and justify the artifact rationally, but in the end you must encounter the poem bodily, as a totality.
We must learn to attend without language for what it is we are experiencing. There are so many worlds that we do not have language for, that perhaps humans will never develop language for, strain as we may. So many beings -- animals, trees, mountains, and rivers -- have no place in any sign system we might design, no expressive agency in any human semiotic. To encounter the other, we can develop language, yes, but we should also learn to open our hearts and bodies to the speech of breath, beak, and branch. We must sensitize ourselves to the poetics of everything.
The American environmentalist Paul Shepard said ‘the grief and sense of loss, that we often interpret as a failure in our personality, is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered.’ How many illegible others, human and nonhuman, have perished because we did not attend to them properly? I think of the terrifying rates of species extinction, as well as the disproportionate death rates of queer, racialized, and otherwise marginalized bodies. How many have not perished, but are reduced in some way, smaller versions of the beings they might have been? A polymathic economist who I consider a mentor tells me he is especially intrigued when he meets someone who is clearly bright and sensitive but inarticulate, and I think of my friends who have downregulated their life force in an effort to be legible instead of remaining moths. How many beautiful and strange possible worlds are we on track still yet to lose?
I think the stakes here are both enormous and invisible. If we do not nurture and practice attention, we will lose everything, and we will not even be aware of what it is that we have lost. We will lose any sense of sacredness. We will ignore real atrocities. We’ll feel an ongoing vague sense of disconnection, loss, and grief as our senses, tastes, and judgment are dulled by a blanket of algorithmic threads. Attention is not sufficient, but I think it is a prerequisite for all that is good and valuable and worth living for.
I’ve been thinking about the limits of critique. Critique is constructive if it is conceptually extensible - if others can build upon it, respond to it, engage with it. In considering rhetorical software and its limits, one could make a similar analogy - a truly extensible, interoperable artifact can resonate across several pace layers, especially if it is built on decentralized, long-lasting infrastructure.
I’m excited about the idea of ‘punctuated artifacts’ - e.g. hosting a week-long or month-long retreat around certain themes, then generating a set of related artifacts, be it a series of letters or a magazine or a gallery. This tradition existed in 90s zine culture but I’d love to learn about communities that are practicing this now.
Short note today (I’m still trying to figure out how best to use this Substack versus my personal website) to say that I just published one of my longer pieces in a while. It’s type-set prettily here.
It was so meaningful to work together with a group of people I admired on topics I think are deeply important; I’d like to do more of this sort of work, and will be announcing the inaugural issue of a new magazine about technology in a month that I’m also deeply excited about.
If the letter prompts anything for you, I’d love to hear about it, especially if you come from a different disciplinary or professional background!
what advice would you give your 23-year-old self? what's the strangest thing that's happened to you this year? what's a folktale you were told growing up? what's a word you've been thinking about?
I’m turning 23 today, which according to the internet means I’ve lived 25% of the average lifespan of an Asian-American female in the USA.
Every year I’ve asked for thought-gifts on questions I can’t get out of my head. My questions this year:
What is the strangest/most surreal thing that has happened to you (this year, or ever)? I’ve been entirely immersed in magical realism and surrealist fiction this year, and curious especially about sensory details and the haptic/auratic experience of the surreal. My friend told me about waking up the morning after she learned she was six months pregnant to a baby bump that had not been there the night before.
What is a folktale or myth that your family told you growing up? I’ve been collecting strange myths and folktales from friends and turning them into longer fiction. If you gift me with a story you were told as a child, I would be so grateful. I’m especially curious about morality tales, ghost stories, and stories about food.
Are there any words you’ve been thinking about recently?
Miscellany: Is there any media or art you’ve enjoyed recently? Any feedback or advice for me?
Here’s a little form, but feel free to leave your answers in the comments as well. Answer one question or all of them, anonymous or leave your name + contact :) Thank you so, so much.
I’ll share my own answers here too:
I’m still documenting the year we just all went through. So much happened for me this year. My grandma, who helped raise me, passed away in China. We watched her leave us over a video call, and could only grieve from afar. I started weightlifting during the pandemic and watched as my body become a strange and unfamiliar thing to me in real-time. I started a company with my sister for fun and then it became a serious thing all too quickly, and I sold it while watching the frenzy around crypto / NFTs / SPACs / GameStop. All these experiences felt surreal and incongruent in different ways, and there are specific sensory details that I’ll share via more writing, hopefully soon!
A boy is incredibly spoiled. His mother loves him too much and serves him hand and foot, even feeding him by hand. He grows into a teen, and his mother’s mother is dying, and so she needs to leave him by himself for the first time. She cooks a massive jianbing (incidentally incredibly delicious), cuts a head-sized hole out of the center, fits it around his neck, and then leaves the village. It’s big enough that it should easily feed him for the two weeks that she is away, but when she comes home, she is horrified to discover that he has starved to death. The jianbing still encircles his neck. He had eaten the portion immediately in front of him, but he was too lazy to even lift his hands and rotate it.
Tender: having a soft or yielding texture: easily broken, cut, or damaged; showing care; something that may be offered in payment. Something something financialization instrumentalization gift economies crypto something something. Coherent thoughts slowly incoming - if you want to talk about gifting culture in crypto I’d love to learn with you. I’m excited to read The Professor and the Madman.
Nowadays, I’m working in mediums that require sprints, not marathons. Short fiction, not novels. Glass, not painstaking pixel-sculpting in Photoshop. I kept trying to write long essays in this Substack on grand themes (here’s one on value that I’m almost-happy with): seeking plateau versus peak experiences, or on Bourdieu’s understanding of taste and how astounding it was that even Virginia Woolf only felt she could develop aesthetic judgment after two years of financial stability, but I think this year is not the year of long coherent thoughts. This is the year of small things.
I’m currently reading The Ministry for the Future, The Spell of the Sensuous, and loved Her Body and Other Parties. I’ve resolved to start using Goodreads a bit more frequently, so let’s be friends there!
Some life updates:
I’m now in New York, will be in Montreal in the fall doing research, then hopefully back to NYC in January.
I signed my first nonfiction book deal with a dear friend of mine (!), but am hoping to embark on fiction short form and long form soon. If you’ve published work, I’d love to read it. I’m also looking to put together an online writing group that’d meet biweekly. If you write spec fic / sci-fi / personal nonfiction (broad, I know!), and such a group would be helpful for you, please let me know!
I’ve taken almost a year's hiatus from writing online, since so much stuff has been going on, but am aiming to write more in public this year, which I’m feeling both excited and nervous about! The main gift from the (still-ongoing) crisis is an increased sense of the fragility and preciousness of my own life, and all life, and I hope to keep this feeling with me in the next quarter of my life. Thank you for giving me some of your own wonderful and precious life and reading this! I hope you spend some quality time offscreen today.